


The Sea as a Metaphor for God

by the_moonmoth



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic, I have feelings about parenthood, Inspired by Art, Kid Fic, M/M, soft but not exactly fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 17:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19950262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_moonmoth/pseuds/the_moonmoth
Summary: What would it be like, to be immortal, to raise a human child?





	The Sea as a Metaphor for God

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this beautiful painting](https://fols-eli.tumblr.com/post/186422383767/the-sea-wont-calm-prints-now-available) by fors-eli on tumblr. I saw it just before I went to bed, and sketched this story out as I was falling asleep. Unbeta'd, but concrit is welcome, as ever.

**The Sea as a Metaphor for God**

Crowley stood at the Juliet balcony with the doors closed against the wind, and his nose buried in a mug of coffee against the cold, and stared pensively down at the beach. 

He had woken to an empty bed, clouds hanging dove-grey and sunrise-pink, thick and feathery in a windswept sky. Aziraphale gone. It wasn’t a mystery where.

Their little holiday cottage on the Jurassic Coast was a quiet, weatherworn thing. Perched on a cliff that shouldn’t by rights survive another hundred years, Crowley had nevertheless told it in no uncertain terms that it would last as long as they wanted it to. Round the back, where it was more sheltered, he had a garden: a few flowering plants, a vegetable patch he would plant up with Eva when the end of this cold spring came. At the front was the cliff, and the cove, and the sea. And, right now, Aziraphale.

So Crowley stood and watched and tried not to worry, while Eva crawled around exploring the small living space behind him, no doubt putting an inadvisable number of inadvisable things in her mouth, and bacon sizzled in the pan. He was still in his dressing gown, because someone had needed attention _right now_ and he’d prioritized caffeine over clothes; it was dark blue instead of black, exposing bare legs and bare feet, and going rather woolly from use, but it was warm and comfortable, and most importantly, Aziraphale had given it to him the first night he’d stayed over at the bookshop. Besides, now that he was retired, Crowley had been dabbling a little in colour: greys and navies, and a single shirt of a burgundy so dark it only looked not-black in certain light. That one had gone down _very well_ with Aziraphale.

On the horizon, out to the west, clouds were gathering with more intent, like a bruise on the edge of vision. Down in the cove, the sun still peaked through in shafts and patches, sending glitter into the air as the waves crested and fell onto the stony beach, frothy and white. Aziraphale stood on the shoreline, a liminal figure in his pale-coloured coat, blurring the boundary between land and sea.

It was getting rougher down there. Usually, Crowley loved a good storm, especially here. He took a great deal of enjoyment in causing landslides that revealed previously-undiscovered species to the amateur fossil-hunters of Dorset. That, and Aziraphale’s tart reproofs and stinging eye-rolls. Today, though… Today he hoped the storm would pass. 

Aziraphale could stand there for hours, if left alone. Days, perhaps. That was one of the things about being what they were: sometimes, time slipped away (they weren't really made to live in it). You could be going about your business, and suddenly, fifty years had passed, and all the humans you had once known were old or dead, and something vital had passed you by.

At his back, Eva let out her patented ear-splitting pterodactyl screech (fossils might be an ongoing joke, but dinosaurs were real as far as Crowley was concerned). He glanced over his shoulder and, having ascertained that the object of her excitement wasn’t the frying pan he’d left unattended on the hob, he took a sip of his cooling coffee and turned back to the french doors.

Having a small child — becoming parents — had anchored them both intimately to time, he and Aziraphale. It wasn’t just the early mornings and the middle-of-the-night wake up calls. It was the way that a day could be so _full,_ the way the passing of an hour (any old hour, some unremarkable time of the day) could hold such significance. The way Eva needed them to be so _present_. It wasn’t always easy, for Aziraphale especially, who could no longer do such things as spend days on end reading and contemplating. That was why Crowley liked to give him these hours when he could; quiet, solitary, uninterrupted. In a way, Aziraphale needed that temporal space to stretch and reconnect with his divine nature. On days like this, Crowley swore he could see the outline of Aziraphale’s wings against the surf, seafoam-white and wind-buffeted. If only it didn’t mean what he was certain it meant; what it had always meant, since Eva. He would spare Aziraphale that pain if he could only teach him how.

But speaking of Eva, it had all gone very quiet behind him, and that was never a good sign.

Turning away from the sea and the angel, Crowley came back into the moment, back into the room, and found Eva sitting on the rug by the coffee table. She looked up when he entered her line of sight, smiled, and said, “Dada!”

“Oh, really,” Crowley replied in amusement, taking in the scene. “That’s how you want to play this?” She had an empty box in her hands and a small mountain of tissues strewn about her person. Her expression was one of genuine, earnest incomprehension, as if to say, _Look at this pile of tissues I am buried under, Dada! How could such a thing have happened?_

“Bah,” she said, waving the box at him.

“Yeah, it’s a box,” he confirmed. “It’s empty now,” he added. “You emptied it.”

“Bah?” 

“Okay, okay,” he conceded. It was a job well done, after all. He clicked the fingers of his free hand, and the tissues realised that they should be folded neatly back inside the box.

Eva gave a frown of deep concentration, and began the important work of emptying the box once more.

They ate and dressed, played and read, and outside the wind picked up and the sky continued to darken. Midmorning was heralded by Eva's disintegrating mood. This routine they followed, this parcelling up and divvying out of the day, was another way that time had got its claws into them: breakfast time, play time, snack time, nap time, repeat, repeat, repeat. The very human rhythm of it was still novel and odd, even as this first year of fumbling about drew to a close.

"Come on, you," Crowley said, extracting Eva from an increasingly fraught battle with the remote control (why did she bang it, only to cry at the noise? He didn't know, but it seemed vitally important to her). "Time for a walk."

Bundling them both up against the brutalities of coastal spring, he swung Eva up onto his back in the hand-woven wrap he had picked up last year in Peckham (an unobtrusive silvery colour with a scrolling pattern in black that somehow reminded him of scales) and started picking his way down the stony path from the clifftop to the beach. Within the first hundred yards, Eva was asleep, a heavy, warm weight, snuggled tight, right against the spot where his wings would have met.

***

The tide was coming in as Crowley approached. Froth-edged water rolled lacy tongues up the pebbles of the beach to lick curiously at Aziraphale’s feet. With the way the wind was pushing the surf, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be wet to his knees. Still, he didn’t twitch or flinch or acknowledge in any way how pissing cold the water was this time of year, or even how the salt would ruin his shoes.

As Crowley got closer, he saw the way the whites of Aziraphale’s eyes glowed unearthly blue, the motionless profile stone-like, sculpture-like, at odds with the flapping of his coat in the wind and the salt-gleam impression of his wings.

“Angel,” Crowley called. There was no way to do it gently, the way his voice squalled away, and he didn’t fancy getting too close just now. “ _Aziraphale._ Time to come back in now, love.”

Aziraphale let out a tremendous sigh that, for a moment, seemed to hold back a wave from its cresting. The air shivered — seen rather than felt — and his half-way wings flexed and faded. He turned to Crowley, smaller than he had been.

“Yes, but how do you do it?” he said.

Crowley knew what he was asking; didn’t know how to answer any better than the first hundred times. “I don’t know,” he said, reaching absent-mindedly to touch the place on his chest where the fabric of the wrap crossed over and dug in a little, right over the breast bone. “I just do.”

“It’s her birthday tomorrow,” Aziraphale said, glancing over Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley twisted slightly so that Aziraphale could see Eva’s face, smooshed up and open-mouthed as it certainly was under her woollen hat, and watched with spreading warmth as Aziraphale’s face melted— just, completely melted. “I feel like I blinked and a year has… poof, disappeared.”

“It didn’t though, really,” he said. “You were there, angel. You were there every step of the way.”

“But it’s all happening so fast,” Aziraphale said. “How do we hold on? How do we keep…”

Crowley reached out, and cupped Aziraphale’s face in his palms. His skin was freezing and damp from the spray, but Crowley’s hands were warm. “Listen, it’s not that I’m not afraid, too.”

“No.” Aziraphale smiled softly at him. “And you do it anyway. Just as you always have.”

Crowley raised his hands and let them drop again. It was as eloquent a response as any. He had never seen fear as a reason to hold back; never been able to _make_ himself hold back, even if it had been; never really wanted to, anyway.

“Do you think She felt this way?” Aziraphale asked. “Do you think She looked at Her creations and realised how short a time She had to love each one? How pain— How painful it would be to say each goodbye?” He gestured at the sea, not the sky, but: immense, unknowable, indifferent, it might as well have been the same thing. 

Crowley didn't answer. He couldn't, not in any meaningful way (wasn’t it just like Aziraphale to show empathy for a maker who wouldn't ever return the favour?) but he also couldn't help bristling at the thought of any parent acting in the way She had (though he knew some did).

“Listen,” he repeated. “Listen to me, Aziraphale. I’m not saying we’re going to do this perfectly, but we _are_ going to do this because we’re _already doing it._ We can choose to do it with love, and, and joy, or we can wallow about in this stinking lava pit of fear. The future’s going to happen anyway. Might as well choose to be happy.”

“Choose?” Aziraphale said with wonder and disbelief. “It’s not that simple, Crowley.”

“Yes, angel. It is.”

Aziraphale was quiet for a long time, gazing at him. Crowley was wind-whipped, spray-stung, starting to get cold, but he waited as patiently as six thousand years had taught him. On his back, Eva stirred, and he reached back to pat her bottom until she subsided into sleep again. When he looked back up, Aziraphale leaned forward and kissed him, salt and sweet and lingering.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”

“‘S all right,” Crowley said, taking his hand. “You’ll get there.”

“I suppose I shall have to choose to.” Aziraphale’s smile was faint, a little self-deprecating, but warm.

“Yes,” Crowley said. “We can do that, now.”

They had chosen each other, after all.

Later, after a cup of tea and a spot of lunch, Crowley stood by the Juliet balcony again and watched the progress of the clouds. The horizon was still yellow-grey and dark, but the storm seemed to be moving north instead of coming east. The wind was dropping, the tide receding, the water calming. Behind him, Aziraphale was reading a book about a farm to their daughter for the sixth or seventh time in a row. Tomorrow would be her birthday, and they would choose to enjoy it, together.


End file.
